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Manaleak

Spring has sprung, which to nerds like me means two things: first, sporadic (yet potentially profitable) sales for Rifftrax and Steam; secondly, somebody in the local area will be organising something for International Tabletop Day. This year was no exception, and quite a few places in Birmingham put something on. Manaleak (a gaming store just off Birmingham’s Irish Quarter) was doing a miniatures event on the day, but as I’m not much into that sort of thing I decided to go with something a bit more local.

Clifton Road Youth Centre was holding two events – one in the afternoon for families, and one in the evening for grown-ups who wanted to play something a bit more complicated than Kerplunk. I have to admit, I was expecting the afternoon event to have a decent mix of grown-ups and kids. The fact that the first game I played was Hungry Hippos broke that delusion quite thoroughly. Granted, I managed to get a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe soon after, with the organiser and a boy who almost got the longest route, but still…

The afternoon ended with me playing Mancala with the girls I’d played Hungry Hippos with (I know their parents through a few local board game meetups, so it wasn’t just me ingratiating myself with random children), which was very enjoyable; in our world of games with apps and custom meeples, we tend to overlook traditional board games. However, all good things must come to an end, and the organisers were literally packing things up as I was making my last move.

The evening event was, of course, a little more varied. It started off with a little Batman Love Letter (we ignored the new rules, because nobody could be bothered to look them up) and we moved on to playing my copy of Thunderbirds: The Co-op Board Game (I actually consider it better to base Pandemic, even if we lost on the easiest difficulty) and were halfway through Colt Express (second-best programming board game – best is 404: Law Not Found), before we realised we were running out of time.